Archived & Upcoming Images of the Day
The Mallard ducks are still with us - we expect them to vanish
when they moult. We have not seen any ducklings yet and may not -
most years they are promptly marched down to the local brook dodging
the traffic :-(
Here is a typical flyby - a female with 2 males. Females seem to
be able to fly faster than the males as here (female in the
middle) - she started behind the males and ended up in front.
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Mallard ducks smothered in Duckweed seems to be the standard view when on the ground at the moment. This male is beginning to lose some of his wonderful colour.
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This fun cloud shape only lasted for half a minute or so before the 'trunk' faded away, but a camera makes it permanent (or at least as permanent as anything human might be).
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The starlings have about halved feeding intensity so we think that one of two families in the loft space has fledged and left without us seeing a thing. But the feeding continues on the remaining family
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The shadow of the starling when on the pipe-top belongs to the
bird when out the original frame. We have only montaged in some
of the shadows because they overlapped and would have appeared as
an unintelligible mess.
Judging zoom vs. detail is a tricky balance between scope and detail.
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Photogenic Female Pheasant.
(Try saying that 3 times quickly!)
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Life is hazardous for pheasants even without people shooting them. Last week one of our's was killed on the main road, and this week the female pheasant on the left seems to have had an unpleasant encounter. All her tail feathers have gone and there is a lot of other feather damage at the rear. We suspect she just managed to escape the predatory attentions of a fox. We have another photo of her 2 days later feeding and looking perfectly healthy apart from the damage, so are hopeful she will be OK.
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This halo round the sun is quite new to us and is said to be
only rarely seen. The narrow ring is in rainbow colours with red
on the inside, and the cirrus clouds (made of ice crystals that
produce the effect) are darker inside the ring than out. The top
of the ring was very faint. This is a cropped but otherwise
unprocessed image.
(Rainbows appear with the sun BEHIND you)
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This somewhat tatty, but nevertheless welcome, Hobby made a single pass right over the house.
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We are seeing the occasional swallow flying over or by our patch. This one unexpectedly perched on the wire above us for a few minutes.
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This Dunnock unexpectedly landed only about 2 metres away and sang a little before departing.
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Some of the Robins are not quite hand tame, but you can get very close where the singing is remarkably loud for such a tiny creature.
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The Starlings in the loft space have been feeding the noisy youngsters from dawn until dusk. The parents sometimes stop on the roof ridge with their current offerings. Here is a photogenic load - a large caterpillar - rather than a bundle of squishy worms .
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What goes in must come out.
The white thing is a Fecal Sac produced by a chick as a 'hygienic
container' that the parent will dump away from the nest. The
conservatory roof they fly over is splattered with the remains!
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Here a starling exits the hole into the loft space, this time without anything to dispose of.
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With the females mostly setting on eggs one of the lonely male
Mallard ducks taking off from the Duck-shaped pond.
This and the next image are accurately spaced at about 7 fps.
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These 3 frames appeared sequentially with gaps of 2 and 21 minutes. It is very unusual to see such similar positions on 3 obviously separate approaches.
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The recent return of Hares after a 20 year absence allowed us to
see them performing their famed 'boxing match' for the first
time ever. There were 3 hares here, the other Hare a couple of animal
lengths to the right of our crop. The competition may be to push
the opponent backwards - each of these 6 images is framed the
same against the background and the loser was pushed left. We
understand that this is usually females repulsing males but we can't
tell the sexes apart in these distant (maybe 250 metres) images.
Images are at about 4 fps with gaps of between 2 and 4 images as indicated.
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A male chaffinch showing us a spread of feathers and his green back as his flaps up the side of the rock. He is in prime breeding condition without any trace of 'Bumblefoot' we see in about half our chaffinches.
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A female Mallard duck fresh from one of the duckweed covered ponds.
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2 Days later the male with even more duckweed arrived to grab some of the recently deposited corn.
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The plethora of gulls (mostly Black-headed) that descended for the harrowing and sowing of the surrounding field have gone, but this great Black-backed Gull made a nice flyby showing both sides of his wings nicely lit.
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You have probably all seen or had pointed out the 'browse line' in major parks, set by the height that deer can reach up, leaving a sharp horizontal line below which there is no foliage. Here is our version in a field to our north. It has been properly fenced so sheep can stay in it long term without an inner electric fence. As a result they have access to the hedge and chew merrily away producing a browse line about 1 metre high.
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A male Mallard, starting the lose some of his bright green head feather, flew by giving us a gentle quack.
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5 years earlier the new farm owners ripped out a hundred or so fruit trees to turn the land 'arable'. We were offered to take any we wanted and we replanted about 10 of which most 'took' - something of a 'pot luck' of absent or sun-bleached labels from 'old varieties' of apple and pear. These apple blossoms are lovely.
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We have left a Swann 'OutbackCam' trail camera aimed on the
potential badger hole in a pond spoil heap and here is a little
selection of the weeks sightings.
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Our one and only clump of Snakes-head fritillary near a laurel bush is the white variant. The rabbits eat all the more normal purple type but leave these.
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Details of a single Snakes Head fritillary flower that grows between the slabs of a set of stepping stones over what used to be a flower bed.
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It's time for the fruit trees to blossom - rather late this year
but making up for it in quantity.
This is Victoria Plum blossom.
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It's time for the fruit trees to blossom - rather late this year
but making up for it in quantity.
This is Blossom on some sort of cherry - have several varieties.
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The Black-Poplar trees (all males nowadays because the flowering females emit an offensive smell & didn't get planted) this year produce a fabulous show of Catkins giving the trees a red haze for a couple of days.
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2 days later the Black Poplar catkins are hanging more open and the vivid red is fading.
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We really are not sure where this female blackbird found this soggy mess, but it was probably at an edge of the main pond. It will undoubtedly become some binding material for her nest.
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"How about it then, Toots"
This pair of chaffinches (male on the left) may be just about to mate -
the female is crouched down to encourage the male.
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So far only the peacock butterfly has settled on the flowers long enough to capture any images. This one is in a reasonable state considering that it has been hibernating all winter.
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The bland blue sky may suggest a 'studio shot' but this lovely peacock butterfly (who will have been in hibernation all winter) was most definitely enjoying the cherry tree blossom out in the 'wild'
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The warmest day so far brought out a few insects including some precious pollinators.
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The warmest day so far brought out a few insects including some precious pollinators. This Honey bee spent only a few seconds around the cherry flowers before 'vanishing'.
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This isn't a bee - it is a Bee-Fly. The half dark wing is characteristic. It was a brief visit & these images 3 montaged together was all we got
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A Song Thrush singing - for us it captures the 'Joy of Spring'
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Can't resist the 3 for 2 offers when out 'shopping' for the nest?
For some reason this Jackdaw sometimes stops on the tree stump
with it's next load of nesting material - usually just one twig or
dried leaf. Here it looks like the woodland floor has been doing
a 'special' on multiple items - a twig + fresh moss + a couple of
autumn leaves, all 'to go'
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Our first record of a Siskin, here feeding on the catkins on the one Lombardy poplar along our access track.
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There are now several lonely male mallard ducks sitting disconsolately or flying about. This is an arbitrary montage of one quacking as it went by.
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Got it!
A Great Tit picks up a corn grain fragment and is about to fly
off with it to somewhere it won't get 'mugged' for it.
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A tree sparrow looks like it has found some exotic seed in the bird mix we are using at the moment, and the husk is just dropping out of the beak.
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